from the soccer-is-a-sport dept

This seems to be progressing more quickly than I would have predicted. We were just talking about a milestone of sorts being reached in eSports, or professional video game tournaments. Last month that milestone was an American university actually offering athletic scholarship money for eGamers. If you look to other sports to measure the legitimacy of eSports and its acceptance as a competitive platform by the general public, it was kind of a big deal.

Yeah, the biggest name in cable sports featured an entire segment, with guest Gabe Newell, covering The International, a Dota 2 tournament with a $10 million-dollar prize-pool. I can already hear some of you groaning over ESPN choosing to cover eSports, decrying it as not really sports and all that, but I'll just rebut that by reminding you that the network runs poker coverage all the time, so there. Interestingly enough, as Kotaku highlighted, it wasn't poker that angry Twitter users appeared to be mirroring with their complaints over the coverage. It was soccer/futbol.

And if that isn't a complete win for eSports, I don't know what is. Note that the response wasn't hugely against the coverage, but the fact that the tenor of anger back at ESPN that did exist sounded very similar to the coverage of a legitimate sport, even if it isn't the most popular sport in America, is probably a better response than most of us supporters could have hoped for.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Lots of people say they'd like to live longer. So longevity has been studied extensively, and a vast number of correlations have been found. The list literally goes on and on and on. This doesn't mean anyone has discovered the cure for death, and these correlations often have no causation logic behind them whatsoever. Drink a glass of wine every day, eat no meat, restrict your calories drastically, and read some of these other correlations.

from the scotus-iot dept

Advocates of digital privacy scored a major victory when the Supreme Court recently ruled that police need a warrant to search cellphones. In Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, two cases that pivot on the legality of searching personal computing devices, what is becoming a tech-centric high court recognized not only the pervasive role technology is playing in modern society, but also the growing personal data that exists as we digitize larger swaths of our everyday lives.

With this decision, the court confirmed what most of us have known for some time: modern cellphones are more than just a technological convenience or device for making phone calls, they're sophisticated "minicomputers" that hold for many of us "the privacies of life." The risks of harm to arresting officers or destruction of evidence do not exist when digital data is concerned. Rather, the justices said, searching the "vast quantities of personal information" on a smartphone is an invasion of privacy that far exceeds the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches of a person's physical property upon an arrest. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts noted, "a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form."

Fittingly, the opinion comes in a year when, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) research, smartphone sales will eclipse 1 billion units for the first time ever. Today, nearly two-thirds of U.S. households own at least one smartphone, and that figure is projected to climb to 71 percent by 2017 as new manufacturers like Amazon and Blackphone enter the market. For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of ourselves. They hold our favorite songs, house our favorite pictures and are home to the names and addresses of just about everyone we love -- even your background picture has a personal story to tell about you. Roberts was even more direct, noting cellphones are "such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy."

The court's opinion reveals an unwillingness, in this realm at least, to simply extend pre-digital precedents to new technologies -- especially when those extensions encroach on the fundamentals of our founders' views on liberty. The ruling follows the unanimous 2012 opinion in United States v. Jones that law enforcement's use of GPS-enabled devices to track suspects' vehicles is considered a search. In that case, the concurring opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor held that police needed a warrant in order to attach a GPS device to monitor movements by a suspect's car. The Court recognizes that the many capabilities of today's technological innovations continue to unfold. More, the technologically-infused life is still in its infancy. Smartphones that double as GPS devices are just the beginning. Soon, wearable technologies like activity trackers and health monitors could provide the government with our most personal data.

Traditionally, the court has held that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding information they show to third parties, so no warrant is required to obtain that information. But today's technology is eroding pragmatic limits on law enforcement's ability to track and trace us. Legal scholars believe that case planted a seed that could transform Fourth Amendment rights in light of modern technology.

In his opinion concurring with the court's decision on cellphone searches, Justice Samuel Alito noted the court is not in a position to evaluate the implications on privacy posed by searching cellphones, considering the amount of information about the lives of Americans that can be gleaned by the government and private entities, and the fact that many Americans are choosing to make so much information available to the public. He suggests that lawmakers are "in a better position… to assess and respond to the changes that have already occurred and those that almost certainly will take place in the future" with legislation to govern the scope and limits of privacy rules involving modern technology. Regulators must take note of the vast ways in which technology will touch our lives in the future.

As technology enables the digitization of more elements of our lives, private information is becoming one of the key components in the market for developing devices that increase connectivity. The court's opinion is perhaps the strongest legal defense of privacy in a world dominated by technology. And it comes at just the right time, because it's not just our phones that are getting smart.

Soon, just about everything we touch will capture data about us. Our cars. Our watches. Our clothing. The fundamental privacies at stake in this ruling transcend far beyond phones. The Supreme Court needed to write its decision with the bigger picture in mind, and it did.

Ultimately, this ruling can arguably apply to the millions -- and eventually billions -- of physical objects that are being connected at an increasing clip to the Internet of Things. And whether the justices realized it or not, this court has now provided important privacy protections that will foster the continued, rapid technological growth our innovation economy demands.

Shawn DuBravac is the chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies. Follow Shawn on Twitter @Twoopinions.

Unlike the typically buzzword heavy responses you normally see from overly compliant ISPs regarding government surveillance, iiNet continues its reputation of being a straightshooter and explaining what's really going on and how the company is working to protect its users.

Law enforcement agencies (like ASIO and Federal and State Police) are proposing private companies, like iiNet, should keep ongoing and very detailed records of customers’ telephone and online activity. We’re not talking targeted surveillance of individuals suspected of a crime, we’re talking about the wholesale collection and storage of data on your online, digital and telephone activity. These records are euphemistically labelled ‘metadata’ – and could include the unfiltered records of your browsing, updates, movements and phone calls, which can be readily matched to the identities in your customer account.

We don’t think this ‘police state’ approach is a good idea, so we’re fighting moves by the Australian Government to introduce legislation that would force us to collect and store your personal information.

iiNet goes even further in explaining and demonstrating graphically just how much "metadata" reveals about you. For example they show a single tweet -- and then all the "metadata" associated with that tweet to show just how much more information is often revealed in the metadata:

From there, iiNet directly takes on the foolish folks who insist they have "nothing to hide."

The data collected can be incredibly sensitive – it can reveal who your friends are, where you go and what websites you visit. Indeed, it may even tell more than the content of a phone call or an email. Recent research from Stanford University showed that when analysed this data may create a revealing profile of a person’s life including medical conditions, political and religious views, friends and associations.

Police say “If you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t be worried”. Personally I think that if you follow that dubious logic, we’d all be walking around naked. It’s not about being worried, or wanting to ‘hide’ anything. It’s about the right to decide what you keep private and what you allow to be shared. YOU should be the one to make that call, and that decision should stick until a warrant or something similar is issued to law enforcement agencies to seize your information.

Not convinced? Then we suggest you check out the startling website based on information collected on German politician Malte Spitz by Deutsche Telekom over just six months. Zeit Online combined this geo-location data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the Internet. It’s really worth a look and illustrates just how informative and personally invasive metadata can be – it is truly scary stuff.

Experts in the US have some equally frightening things to say about metadata. According to NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker, “…metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life.” General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and frighteningly asserted, “We kill people based on metadata.”

Brandis, in the past, has seemed totally impervious to people who have a different opinion than he does (even if they have the evidence on their side), so it's unclear how much good this will do. Still, it's good to see an ISP that is loudly and clearly standing up against data retention, and not hiding behind misleading language, but clearly stating what's happening and why it's bad.

from the definition-of-insanity dept

I first became aware of The Pirate Bay in 2006 when the site was raided by Swedish law enforcement and taken offline for a few days. Of course, the site came back online soon after, and all of the attention from taking it down resulted in a massive increase in awareness and traffic. Over the years, we've noticed a rather obvious pattern here. Every single time we hear about an attack on The Pirate Bay, it seems to get more traffic. In fact, TorrentFreak is reporting that despite all of the various countries that have officially ordered ISPs to block access to the site, traffic to The Pirate Bay has doubled since 2011. In fact, the traffic growth appears to be fairly steady:

The really incredible thing is that, eight years after the initial raid, despite multiple lawsuits (even people in jail) and a variety of ISP blockades, it appears that the entertainment industry still hasn't learned a damn thing about understanding why people like The Pirate Bay and why its efforts to take it down keep failing. The industry's infatuation turned what had been a little-known Swedish torrent tracking site into a global phenomenon that makes them look worse and worse every time they fail to recognize what's happening.

from the questions-to-ponder... dept

So, last week, that customer service call between Ryan Block and a Comcast "retention specialist" who refused to take "cancel the damn service" for an answer went viral. Comcast has since apologized, said it was investigating, and insisted that the call was "not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives." I doubt many people actually believe that -- but it may be even more serious than most people realize.

That's because, throughout the call, the nameless representative keeps insisting that Comcast's broadband is the fastest. And that's not true. Which raises some potentially serious questions about Comcast directly misleading customers.

“You’re not interested in the fastest Internet in the country?” the rep asked goadingly. “Why not?”

Were it true, it would be a convincing bit of rhetoric. The problem is, Comcast is not the fastest Internet service provider in the United States -- at least, not according to the most recent survey from Speedtest.net and PC Magazine. Published in September 2013, the survey ranks Comcast the third fastest broadband provider, behind Midcontinent Communications at No. 2 and Verizon FiOS at No. 1. “Verizon FiOS continues to set the pace for Internet speed in the United States,” the magazine wrote.

IBTimes asked a Comcast PR person, who insisted that the company does not claim to be the fastest internet in the country, nor does it train its reps to make that claim. But it's undeniable that the guy said exactly that many, many times during the call, and it sure sounded like it was coming from a script that he'd read pretty damn often. The report also notes that the guy repeatedly called Comcast the "number 1 rated" provider, but that's equally questionable. IBTimes did call up pretending to be a potential customer and couldn't get any other reps to repeat the "fastest internet in the country" line -- suggesting that it might not be on a script -- but it is worth noting that they were talking to a different type of rep. Block was being handled by special "customer retention" specialists -- so it might be more interesting to see if those guys have that line in their script. Though, at this point, I'd imagine Comcast has pretty carefully scrubbed those scripts.

from the come-check-it-out dept

Starting right about... now, I'm doing an AMA over at Reddit. It's mainly supposed to be focused on issues related to net neutrality (and our crowdfunding campaign -- which we've explained in detail here), but it's an Ask Me Anything, so the topic certainly isn't limited. Come for the net neutrality discussion, and stick around for a fuller explanation of the pros and cons of duck sized horses. Just don't ask me about the movie Rampart.

from the flexing-muscle-and-looking-stupid dept

Here's copyright once again playing the thug role because rights must be enforced and the subsequent harm, etc. and so forth until things are broken and people are angry and in the end, the "victor" is able to walk away from a battle not worth fighting, much less worth winning. (via Nate Hoffelder)

Sam Morris, a UK mobile and web designer currently employed with The Guardian, put together a few mobile/computer wallpapers based on the distinctive seat patterns found in the London Underground. Here are two examples of his creations:

It's such a lightweight project (possibly not in terms of effort, but in the scheme of things, as they say) that it's surprising it drew the attention of Transport for London, the agency that ostensibly controls all things related to the London Underground. (This is not its first time playing the role of IP thug.)

Morris didn't charge for these wallpapers, nor did he attempt to make it appear as though his work was officially-sanctioned or otherwise a part of Transport for London's purview. And yet, TFL decided this fun little project that united fans of the Tube and pleasurably tacky patterns needed to go. A creative outlet now memorialized by this tweet...

Unfortunately due to a copyright claim by Transport for London, the backgrounds are no longer available for download.

I'd like to quickly thank everyone who visited the site over the past week for your enthusiasm.

One whole week before a government agency throttled it into nonexistence. Apparently, TFL said it sells products of its own featuring these patterns -- actual, physical products -- and that was enough to head off someone who wasn't even competing in the same space. Morris was not even competing, period. He offered free wallpapers for devices and could easily have partnered with with TFL to add his work to its offerings.

Or it just could have left it alone and enjoyed the small tribute Sam Morris had created. Now, all it has is a useless assertion of rights that has served to do nothing more than turn a small part of the population against it.

from the say-what-now? dept

Over the last few years, there's been a ridiculous rise in a bizarre form of anti-Silicon Valley populism, in which people are encouraged to hate successful internet companies for... being successful. Usually, when you dig into the details, the attacks on the firms are a combination of general fear of "bigness," hatred/jealousy of success and a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Now, let's be clear: big companies with too much power do have a rather long history of bad behavior and companies should be watched carefully if they abuse their position. But the anti-internet populism seems incredibly misplaced, especially given that the companies they're attacking are often companies that have clearly improved the lives of those doing the attacking. I'm always worried about old "enabling" companies becoming the new gatekeepers, but I'm also confident in the ability of a brand new generation of enablers to undermine business models of the last generation of internet giants as well -- especially if they start making moves that actually harm the public.

But, it seems, this general hatred of Silicon Valley is being taken to nearly parodic levels with two new articles, one in Salon and one in Slate, both of which call for "nationalizing" some of the internet's most popular companies. First up, we have Richard "RJ" Eskow saying that we should nationalize Amazon and Google because the original internet was publicly funded, and thus, apparently, everything built after that should be owned by the federal government.

Big Tech was created with publicly developed technology. No matter how they spin it, these corporations were not created in garages or by inventive entrepreneurs. The core technology behind them is the Internet, a publicly funded platform for which they pay no users’ fee. In fact, they do everything they can to avoid paying their taxes.

Big Tech’s use of public technology means that it operates in a technological “commons,” which they are using solely for its own gain, without regard for the public interest. Meanwhile the United States government devotes considerable taxpayer resource to protecting them – from patent infringement, cyberterrorism and other external threats.

Of course, based on this absolutely idiotic argument, you could argue that we should nationalize just about every business out there. Fedex and UPS? Why they make use of the federal highway system, which was publicly funded. So, "no matter how they spin it," the "core infrastructure" behind them was "publicly funded." Ditto for the entire US automobile industry (though, to be fair, we kinda came pretty close to "nationalizing" them a few years back). How about Wall Street? I mean, look at it: it's entirely dependent on federal currency. Clearly: should be nationalized. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with a business that shouldn't be nationalized under these conditions. Almost every business relies on some aspect of publicly-funded infrastructure.

From there, Eskow insists that these companies are "abusive," which again is apparently a reason why they should be nationalized (he doesn't explain how the two are connected or why he believes nationalized companies would be less prone to abusive power -- because he can't). But he picks some rather unfortunate examples for "abuse."

The bluntness with which Big Tech firms abuse their monopoly power is striking. Google has said that it will soon begin blocking YouTube videos from popular artists like Radiohead and Adele unless independent record labels sign deals with its upcoming music streaming service (at what are presumably disadvantageous rates). Amazon’s war on publishers like Hachette is another sign of Big Tech arrogance.

Except, as we've detailed, neither of those stories is even remotely accurate. Artists are not being blocked from YouTube, they're being offered a better deal if they want to monetize their videos. Some don't like the terms of that deal, but they can still upload their own videos, just not to the monetized services of YouTube. And the Amazon/Hachette example is not a "war on publishers" so much as it's an attempt to get better prices for consumers. Apparently, Eskow would like to side with the publishers over the public. Why?

Eskow also finds his "support" in odd places:

Even Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer argued that Google is a “monopoly” whose activities were “worthy of discussion with competition authority.” He should know.

Wait. A company that is being beat left and right by an upstart competitor is complaining that that competitor should be regulated? Gee, that means absolutely nothing.

Nowhere in the entire piece does Eskow even attempt to explain how "nationalizing" these firms would actually solve any of these issues. He just insists it would. Apparently he's unaware of how "wonderful" service is from nationalized companies. I'm sure bureaucracies and government controls are just great for innovation. And, if we're talking about abuse, shall we bring up what happened with the history of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were "de facto nationalized?"

Eskow also goes on and on about the privacy violations of these companies, but for a deeper discussion on that, we'll flip over to Salon competitor Slate, where Philip Howard has an article about how we should nationalize Facebook because of that company's long-standing problems on the privacy front:

By “nationalizing Facebook,” I mean public ownership and at least a majority share at first. When nationalizing the company restores the public trust, that controlling interest could be reduced. There are three very good reasons for this drastic step: It could fix the company’s woeful privacy practices, allow the social network to fulfill its true potential for providing social good, and force it to put its valuable data to work on significant social problems.

Let’s start with privacy. Right now, the company violates everybody’s privacy expectations, not to mention privacy laws. It also struggles to respond properly to regulatory requests in different countries. In part, this is because its services are designed to meet the bare minimum of legal expectations in each jurisdiction. When users in Europe request copies of the data Facebook keeps on them, they are sent huge volumes of records. But not every user lives in a jurisdiction that requires such responsiveness from Facebook—U.S. users are out of luck because their regulators don’t ask as many questions as those in the European Union and Canada. Privacy watchdogs consistently complain that the company uses user data in ways they didn't agree to or anticipate. There are suspicions that the company creates shadow profiles of people who aren’t even users but whose names get mentioned by people who are Facebook users.

It's completely reasonable to question Facebook's privacy practices, and its history of arbitrarily changing things and being involved in "creepy" behavior. But, again, there's a massive leap in logic to go from "hey, Facebook isn't very good at protecting your privacy" to "let's hand the company over the to US government." I don't know if Philip Howard has been living under a rock for the past 13 months or so, but if there's one organization that appears to respect your privacy even less than Facebook, it would be the US government. The very same US government that is actively looking for new ways to spy on as many people as possible. And Howard thinks the approach to "protect" users' privacy from Facebook is to... give all that info directly to the US government?

In fact, Howard actually argues directly for how wonderful it would be for the US gov't to be able to snoop through our data to perform "research" on it:

Nationalizing Facebook would allow more resources to go into data mining for public health and social research.

Somehow, he claims that if the company were "nationalized," then there would magically be higher ethical standards to make sure this research is "good" and not "evil." He also has a funny notion whereby if Facebook were nationalized, not only would it be useful in tracking down bad people, but "good" activists that we liked could also be allowed to use pseudonyms, rather than real names. Because that's exactly what we want: the US government picking and choosing which activists are "good."

Having read both of these articles, I'm kind of wondering if they're both a form of satire, mocking the idea of nationalization or even the anti-internet populism we've been seeing lately -- but it looks as if they're both serious, if totally ridiculous.

from the because-that's-what-copyright-does dept

Right now the issue of housing in San Francisco is a big local topic -- and while I tend to agree that the real issue is the regulations limiting the building of new housing in and around the city, the fight has gotten quite nasty at times. It often seems to focus on two issues (neither of which are the true cause of the problem): local evictions for longtime tenants, and tech workers. You can certainly understand the frustration, even if it's mostly misguided. Still, even given that, this seems like a clear abuse of copyright law by some of the lawyers who have been helping train people to conduct those evictions: using a bogus DMCA takedown to hide a video of a protest of one of their training sessions.

Jackson West attended one of the sessions and video taped people protesting it at a seminar given by lawfirm Bornstein & Bornstein. You can see the video below via Vimeo:

However, you cannot see it on YouTube, because Daniel Bornstein issued a bogus copyright notice over the video.

The full article is worth reading, as it includes West calling up Bornstein to talk about things and Bornstein appearing to offer to trade meeting in person for pulling the takedown notice. No matter where you stand on the issue of evictions in SF, hopefully everyone can agree that issuing a bogus copyright notice to delete a video of people protesting you is not okay. Hell, even if you think Bornstein is doing the right thing in helping evict people, hopefully you'll still agree that abusing copyright in this manner is simply wrong.

In West's account (which is, obviously, just his side of the story), Bornstein doesn't seem to understand copyright laws:

...he began asking to meet in person in order to be “presented as human, multi-dimensional.” I pointed out that issuing a takedown notice without contacting me first didn’t really offer me that same benefit of the doubt. I asked if he’d actually watched the video, which he didn’t confirm but instead indicated that he’d objected to the characterization of the incident in the description, complained about other videos of the event (which can’t be found on YouTube, suggesting he may have issued additional claims) and asked to be sent a copy.

Just because you object to the "characterization" of the event, it doesn't magically give you the right to abuse copyright law.

Bornstein promised that if I agreed to meet he would consider dropping the matter, but when I made it clear that I reserved the right to publish a story before the meeting, he replied he’d then have to contact copyright counsel. While not directly stated, the implication was clear that if I agreed to hold the story until after meeting with him, he’d agree to drop the claim.

Later in the story, there's an "update" when West goes to meet with Bornstein. After a dispute about whether things are on or off the record, Bornstein trots out another non-copyright, but still bogus, reason for issuing the copyright takedown, claiming West is not "a legitimate reporter."

When I pointed out that a story was already online, along with the video, he rescinded the offer. However, seemingly confused over the difference between copyrights and privacy rights, he seemed intent on arguing that I wasn’t acting as a legitimate reporter for having attended the event and filmed the protest without notifying the firm first.

That doesn't really have anything to do with privacy rights either -- and even if it did, it still doesn't give Bornstein (a lawyer, remember) the right to abuse copyright law to takedown the video.

Yet again, we see copyright being abused for the purpose of censorsing content someone doesn't like.

Update: As noted in the comments, YouTube has put the video back up...

from the say-that-again? dept

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee held yet another copyright hearing, this one on Moral Rights, Termination Rights, Resale Royalty, and Copyright Term. We've discussed these issues at different times, and the hearing itself didn't break any major ground on anything, really. The artist resale right issue is nothing but a blatant money grab by successful artists, demanding to get paid any time one of their works gets resold. It shafts younger, up-and-coming artists to the benefit of the few, super-successful artists.

However, the tidbit that caught my attention was the copyright term issue. As you know, some are expecting there to be a fight in the near future to extend copyrights yet again. Thanks to repeated copyright extension, brought to you by relentless lobbying from Disney and others, the US hasn't had a previously copyrighted work fall into the public domain in ages. However, there actually has been some inkling that maybe, just maybe, Hollywood had realized this wasn't a fight worth taking on. In fact, we were pleasantly surprised when the head of the Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, presented her (mixed bag) plan for copyright reform, that it actually included a reduction in copyright terms rather than an increase.

And yet... two of the panelists last week laid out arguments for why the currently insane levels of copyright terms are perfectly reasonable. Of course, to do so, both had to totally misrepresent reality, often to levels that one might call disingenuous. Of course, the two individuals who made these arguments have appeared in stories on Techdirt before, so it really wasn't a huge surprise. First up, was Rick Carnes, the head of the Songwriters Guild of America. Carnes is from the old school world where internet hatred is a thing of pride. He seems to think that the internet destroyed songwriting and that no one could possibly write songs without strong copyrights. Carnes also got some attention for demanding extra payment for songwriters when Apple increased iTunes previews from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. That's the kind of person we're dealing with here.

His filing on copyright terms was so ridiculous that the Association of Research Libraries had to step in and correct all the "myths" he stated. Here's a little secret: when unprompted librarians step in to tell you you're totally wrong, you're not going to look very good. The ARL notes that Carnes is simply wrong in saying that the US's copyright term lengths "represent the international standard." They don't. As the ARL notes:

The copyright term in the United States extends well beyond the Berne Convention’s standard and beyond the term of protection in the majority of countries. Many countries’ copyright terms are set by the international agreements to which they are bound. The Berne Convention sets the minimum copyright term as the life of the author plus fifty years. The current term of protection in the United States is set at a period of the life of the author plus an additional seventy years. For corporate works or “works for hire,” the period of protection is set at ninety-five years. These terms far exceed what is required by international law.

As ARL further notes, it's the US that is actually out of step with "international standards":

The vast majority of countries use the Berne standard of life plus fifty years; there are almost twice as many countries with a period of protection shorter than the current term in the United States than there are countries with a period of life plus seventy years or greater

Carnes also totally ignores (as mentioned above) that the Copyright Office boss has, herself, called for shorter terms, instead saying that the Copyright Office believes the current term is proper. And finally, Carnes totally misrepresents the Supreme Court's ruling in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case to mean that the Supreme Court is fine with the current length of copyright. But, as anyone who knows anything about the decision realizes, that's not what the case was actually decided on. Instead, SCOTUS merely said that Congress has the authority to determine the appropriate term, and the Court wasn't going to overrule Congress. As the ARL explains to flunking student Carnes:

The Supreme Court never addressed the question of whether a period of protection of life plus seventy years was appropriate. The Court only upheld the power of Congress to set the term and extend the term retroactively. The majority opinion in Eldred, while upholding the Copyright Term Extension Act, never addressed the propriety or benefits of the extension itself. Instead, the court addressed “the authority the Constitution assigns to Congress to prescribe the duration of copyrights.” As Justice Stevens’ dissent further points out, the question of “whether the extraordinary length of the grants authorized by the 1998 Act are invalid because they are the functional equivalent of perpetual copyrights is a question that need not be answered in this case because the question presented by the certiorari petition merely challenges Congress’ power to extend retroactively the terms of existing copyrights.”

Perhaps even worse than Carnes' filing, however, is that of Tom Sydnor, who currently hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Sydnor is sort of a joke in the copyright world. Once responsible for whatever ridiculous expansion of copyright policy Senator Orin Hatch was pushing out, since leaving his job as a Congressional staffer, Sydnor has bumped around making increasingly ridiculous arguments for stronger and stronger copyright -- while occasionally stooping to take Larry Lessig quotes totally out of context as part of a smear campaign against him. Some of Sydnor's previous hits include claiming that universities who don't turn students over to the RIAA are helping terrorists and pedophiles, that the RIAA getting a jury to award it $1.92 million from Jammie Thomas for sharing 24 songs was a perfectly reasonable outcome and that France's (totally failed) Hadopi policy of kicking file sharers offline represented "consumer relief." So I'm already pre-conditioned to expect arguments that are reality-challenged from Sydnor, and he does not disappoint. His challenge was to try to take the life plus 70 term of today's copyright, and argue that it's completely consistent with the Founding Father's vision, which had copyright set at 14 years, plus a renewal for another 14 years. And rather than just admit this is ridiculous, Sydnor gives it the old Sydnor try and basically makes up a bunch of stuff. First, he states this, which has no basis in reality:

The Framers concluded that copyright term should last during the lifetime of a work’s author,
and for a (potentially short) post-mortem-author period in which an author’s copyrights could
support his or her spouse and children.

They did no such thing. If they wanted copyright terms to last the lifetime, they had every opportunity to make it so. They did not. The founders were well aware that the initial term of copyright quite frequently resulted in works going into the public domain during the author's lifetime -- and they were actually quite okay with that.

the Framers’ principle of providing at least life-of-the-author copyright protection repeatedly
required term to increase. Over time, authors and others simply began living longer than they tended to
in 1790. For example, since 1790, the average human lifespan has increased by about 100% – from
about 40 years to about 80 years. The Framers’ premise of life-of-the-author copyright term then
required increases in copyright term.

So, we've already established that the basis of this point is simply incorrect, but even so, Sydnor is now building an incorrect argument on top of an incorrect argument. The increase in life-expectancy is true, but much of that came from better medical care concerning births and baby care. In other words, if you made it through the early years, you were expected to live much older than 40 years old. And I don't think that the founders were setting the length of copyright terms to encourage infants to write books. By ignoring infant mortality and child deaths, Sydnor is blatantly misleading people to pretend that the life expectancy of authors doubled. It did not.

In the US, legislative calculations of copyright term have always been driven by estimates of how long human authors are likely to live. Human life spans change gradually, but laws that calculate copyright terms by estimating human life spans do not – and that is another reason
why changes in copyright term have been applied retroactively, to then-existing works.

Again, that's clearly bogus. The increase in the lifespan of authors has been tiny. Some have basically argued that once you account for infant mortality, there's been very little change in life expectancy over the last few centuries. And yet, copyright terms have gone from a maximum of 28 years to what's now likely to be more like 150 years. I don't care how you calculate life expectancy (even if you include infant mortality rates), things have not changed that much.

Either way, these kinds of blatantly dishonest arguments are likely to become increasingly common as we approach the next round of fights concerning copyright terms. Don't let them get away with it.

from the let's-keep-it-quiet-by-making-it-even-more-public dept

A few weeks ago, an anonymous internet user was able to acquire and subsequently extract a website blacklist used by Germany's Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Children (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien [BPjM]). This un-hashed list was posted to the user's Neocities blog, along with some analysis of the blacklist's contents and a rundown on the minimal protective efforts used for the list.

The actual blacklist is much more extensive than what's published here. In fact, as is noted in the post, a majority of the list is publicly viewable.

The censorship list ("index") is split into various sublists:

Sublist A: Works that are harmful to young people Sublist B: Works whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) (in the opinion of the BPjM) Sublist E: Entries prior to April 1, 2003 Sublist C: All indexed virtual works harmful to young people whose distribution is prohibited under Article 4 of the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag Sublist D: All indexed virtual works, which potentially have content whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch.

The sublists A, B and E contain about 3000 movies, 400 games, 900 printed works and 400 audio recordings. That sublists are quarterly published in the magazine "BPjM-aktuell" which can be read in any major library in Germany.

Sublists C and D are what's been withheld from the public, even as these URLs are distributed once a month to software and hardware companies. As of the time of the posting, there were more than 3,000 URLs on the blacklist.

The leaker spotted some unusual things in the list of banned URLs. To begin with, it appears that there's very little effort being made to keep the blacklist current.

On only about 50-60% of the domains on the list the questionable content is still accessible: About 10% of the domains are not registered at all, another 10% are parked domains, and about 20% don't provide any content at all (either no DNS A record, no webserver on port 80 or a redirect to another domain).

Beyond that, the government body building the list seems to be suffering from technical ineptitude, resulting in supposedly blocked sites not being blocked at all.

The domain "homo.com" offers a wildcard domain which echoes anything that is entered as a subdomain on the website, eg. visiting "Fritz.homo.com" results in a webpage "Haha, Fritz is gay!". On the BPjM list there is a entryirgend.ein.name.homo.com – the German "Irgend ein Name" stands for "any name". Contrary to the belief of the BPjM public servants this doesn't work as a wildcard – just this specific domain will be blocked…

several URLs with a wrong trailing slash:

Death.html/ welcome.htm/ free/index.html/ freecontent.html/

A URL path with a trailing slash means that the part before the slash is a directory and not a file. The examples above are filenames. The entries on the list with the trailing slash are invalid and return a 404 file not found error. The correct URLs without the trailing slashes won't match the hash and are not blocked. Explanation here...

As is inevitable when entities pursue bulk website blocking, non-offending content is part of the collateral damage.

[T]he complete sell list of leading online music database Discogs. Probably at one point in time there was a listing of a music album which is forbidden in Germany – this was enough to block access to the "eBay of music" for years...

[A]ccording to archive.org the domain facegoo.com is since at least 3 years not an porn website anymore. Now it is the website of an iPhone App for fun picture manipulation. The startup has no chance to be listed in German search engine results at all...

This is on top of strange and very arbitrary blockages, like a listing for the videogame Dead Island at amazon.co.uk and a few offending YouTube accounts whose account pages are blocked, but not the offending videos themselves.

Beyond that, the list covers a wide variety of offensive-to-the-German-government (and in some cases, offensive to nearly everyone) content, including "normal porn, animal porn, child/teen porn, violence, suicide, nazi or anorexia." Notably, the Wikipedia page quoted in this post points out that BPjM is an anomaly in the "free" world.

Germany is the only western democracy with an organization like the BPjM... The rationales for earlier decisions to add works to the index are, in retrospect, incomprehensible reactions to moral panics.

Two lists (containing URLs) were published on one of your blogs, namely https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/. The list of URLs contains child sexual abuse material (CSAM), animal pornography, nazi propaganda, minors in poses involving unnatural sexual emphasis and content inciting hatred, just to name a few. All of the URLs are illegal under German law. Since CSAM is also illegal under US law, we are of the opinion that this site violates the laws applying to your service and also violates your terms of conditions.

More properly stated, the websites contain the offensive material, not the URLs themselves. And, as was pointed out by the person researching the list, much of what's in the list is out of date (i.e., the URL no longer contains the illegal content, domain is expired, etc.) or is ineptly targeted (typos, invalid URLs, etc.), which means the list isn't nearly as useful as the government believes.

And, if the statement about violating two countries' laws wasn't (theoretically) frightening enough, KJM goes on to claim that posting this content violates Neocities own mission statement. (No. Really.)

The KJM sees that neocities values anonymity and states to be uncensored. But the KJM thinks that https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/ is not what your service is intentionally for as your website states: “But our goal is clear: to enable you to harness the creativity, beauty, and power of creating your own web site. To rebuild the web we lost to monotony, and make it fun again.”

The statement is truly wondrous in its inanity, approaching the level of non sequitur. At no point does the mission statement encourage the stripping of anonymity or encourage censorship. Neocities is a platform for website construction, something KJM believes is somehow contrary to sticking up for its users and their content. Leave it to a government agency to craft one of the emptiest paragraphs to ever grace an official takedown request.

The biggest issue is the list itself, the one the government wants to keep out of the hands of the public, as Neocities points out.

There is apparently no legal way to challenge the list. It is decided by fiat in secret by a German government agency, and there is little or zero recourse for those falsely condemned.

By keeping it secret -- ostensibly to prevent the public from accessing illegal content -- website owners are kept in the dark about the German government's censorious efforts. This sort of power is dangerous without accountability. The list is outdated and composed carelessly. Sites like Discogs are blocked off while true offenders remain uncensored because the "for the children" agency can't be bothered to ensure its slash marks are properly used or that the URL is free of typos.

Neocities has discussed this unofficially with the EFF but, as the post notes, the legal implications of this leaked list are still very murky. As a precaution the list has been removed. (It survives, for now, at the Internet Archive.) And, if given notification that the posting of the list does not violate US law, the BPjM blacklist will be reposted. Either way, Neocities states that it will not punish the end user in any way and that his/her access to the site will remain intact.

The ultimate stupidity of this debacle is the fact that the German government thinks it can undo what's been done. By acting in this fashion, it's only drawn more attention to the list it wants to remain a secret. Worse, it's drawn more attention to the blog post highlighting the many failures of the list itself. It's one thing to want to prevent access to clearly illegal material. It's quite another to slap together a list composed of dead sites, mistyped URLs and a variety of bizarre blockings based on "incomprehensible reactions to moral panics."

from the our-post-cookie-era dept

ProPublica has a new story about the rise of "canvas fingerprinting," a new method of tracking users without using cookies. It's a method that is apparently quite difficult to block if you're using anything other than Tor Browser. In short, canvas fingerprinting works by sending some instructions to your browser to draw a hidden image -- but does so in a manner making use of some of the unique features of your computer, such that each resulting image is likely to be unique (or nearly unique). The key issue here is that the popular "social sharing" company AddThis, which many sites (note: not ours) use to add "social" buttons to their website, had been experimenting with canvas fingerprinting to identify users even if they don't use cookies. As ProPublica's Julia Angwin notes, it's very difficult to block this kind of thing -- and tons of sites make use of AddThis -- including WhiteHouse.gov (whose privacy policy does not seem to reveal this, saying it only uses Google Analytics as a third party provider).

The report does note that others who have tried canvas fingerprinting have found that it's not necessarily accurate enough yet, but the technology appears to keep getting better. Still, AddThis says it's likely to drop it anyway, because it's not good enough yet:

AddThis said it rolled out the feature to a small portion of the 13 million websites on which its technology appears, but is considering ending its test soon. “It’s not uniquely identifying enough,” Harris said.

AddThis did not notify the websites on which the code was placed because “we conduct R&D projects in live environments to get the best results from testing,” according to a spokeswoman.

The company also insisted it wasn't doing anything bad with the tracking, but even if you believe that's true, how long will it be until others make use of similar fingerprinting for more questionable behavior.

Given the attention this is getting, hopefully browsers will at least role out features that allow users more notification and control over such practices. Cookies are hardly a perfect solution, but at least users have control over them.

from the encryption-works dept

The net neutrality debate has been underway for many years now, but more recently it has entered the mainstream. The main arguments in favor of preserving net neutrality -- that it creates a level playing field that allows innovation, and prevents deep-pocketed incumbents from using their financial resources to relegate less well-endowed startups to the Internet slow lane -- are familiar enough. But PC World points us to a fascinating paper by Sascha D. Meinrath and Sean Vitka in the journal "Critical Studies in Media Communication" that offers a new and extremely important reason for defending net neutrality: that without it, it will be hard to fight back against blanket surveillance through the wider use of encryption (pdf). Here's the main argument:

One particularly problematic industry practice is the move by ISPs to create tiered or preferential service offerings. Plans to create tiered services have been floated for years -- enabled in part by constant pressure toward less competition in the broadband market. In fact, within mobile broadband services, tiering of various applications (e.g. voice, texting, data) are already normative. But if an ISP can't tell what sort of application is being used, it doesn't know whether to prioritize or deprioritize a specific communications stream -- which is why good encryption breaks one of the fundamental assumptions for this new business model. Since encryption can help circumvent discriminatory practices, the incentive to use it will expand with practices like tiering.

If net neutrality disappears, and tiering becomes more common, users may turn to encryption to thwart traffic analysis by ISPs. That, in its turn, is likely to lead to ISPs putting encrypted traffic in the slow lane by default -- or even trying to ban it altogether. Either would ensure that the majority of users would go back to using communications in the clear, since they would probably be unwilling to pay for their security, which is non-obvious and hard to measure, with the loss of speed -- something that is immediately all-too evident.

You might think that it is unlikely that ISPs would be able to push through changes with such serious implications for their customers' privacy -- not least because the usual worthy digital rights organizations would doubtless fight back fiercely. But as Meinrath and Vilka rightly point out, there could be an unholy alliance between industry and security services that would be hard to defeat:

It is difficult to imagine a politician standing up for privacy and free speech rights when opposition of this position, from both well-moneyed private industry and law enforcement, proclaim that encryption supports 'copyright infringement, child pornography, and terrorism' -- all at once.

That rings horribly true: the copyright industries would doubtless love to get encrypted connections banned, as would the NSA. Bringing together the perfect scaremongering trinity of copyright infringement, child pornography and terrorism could well create a winning combination. The best way to avoid this nightmare scenario is to head it off early. Save net neutrality now, and you save the one thing that we think can help us against surveillance: end-to-end encryption.